“Well, I would say yes, I suppose, it did help,” her mother answered finally.
“You suppose?”
“Grandpa never left us, no matter how much he threatened to. He remained. Sometimes he sat with us, far away, and you could very nearly set him on fire without him noticing. In fact I remember him burning. I do. Burning very prettily right there in his chair.” She pointed at the wall.
“Mother.” Ida touched her hand.
“But his distance from us, emotionally, became less threatening. How do you measure emotional distance? Miles? Days? That’s almost always the question, I think. I never asked Grandma about it. But because my father stayed I would say the medication worked for us. That’s what we all always said, anyway, and I guess that’s what I’m saying now.”
Her mother looked at Ida, bewildered.
“Is that what I’m saying, sweetheart?”
“Yes, Mom,” said Ida. “That is. That’s what you’ve said.”
“Oh good.” She grabbed Ida’s hand. “I made sense, didn’t I?”
“You did. You absolutely did.”
“I want to. I so want to. You know that, right?”
“You always will to me, Mom.”
Her mother looked up at her with such kindness. Her eyes, though, showed something else, and she looked around as if she’d lost something.
“What is it, Mom? Are you okay?”
“Oh yes, oh yes,” she said, but she seemed nervous in front of Ida, or shy.
“I was just thinking, dear, that you are almost as beautiful as my daughter. I would very much like for you to meet her. She visits me here. She’s coming soon.”
She used to correct her mother, but she’d since been advised not to, and sometimes, lately, her mother’s phrasing made a strange sort of sense to her.
Ida smiled and took her mother’s hand. “I would like that, Mom. I really would.”
Together they stared at the door, but the only person to finally come in was the nurse, who said she had to swap out garbage cans because there was sort of a problem with one of them, and that problem, as it was poured out of her mother’s garbage can into a paper bag, was certainly nothing that Ida ever wanted to see again.
After work the next day, across town, Ida brought a spoonful of soup to her father’s lips.
“You think I’m an imbecile,” he said, staring past her hand at the TV.
“I don’t.”
“An idiot, at any rate. Don’t insult me.”
“No, Dad.”
“You look at me with utter disgust.”
Ida stroked her father’s forehead. He still had his hair. He had a broad, smooth forehead and if he could be made to stand upright, and dressed in a suit, he would be so handsome.
“Are you tired, Dad?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”
It was a good answer. Ida was tired, too. Did anyone, when asked, ever say they weren’t?
As usual, her father was watching the news, but, as far as she could tell—from the colors on the TV and the old-fashioned clothing the newscasters wore—it was news from a good while ago. Did they show reruns of such things? Maybe this old news was suddenly relevant again?
“What’s this, Dad?”
“Just what it looks like. It’s a funeral. You have to listen very carefully.”
Ida couldn’t really understand the men on the screen. They spoke a foreign language, like one she might have learned in high school and since forgotten. She looked at her father and marveled that he seemed to be following this. He was utterly engrossed.
It seemed like a standard newscast. Four men at a table, a wireframe globe spinning behind them. Ida tried to settle in and just be there with her father, to relax and enjoy his company and do something with him. She had so much to do, so much to do, so much to do, but it was useless to think about it. She tried not to look too carefully around her father’s room. The bed, the little chair—far too small for anyone who might ever visit him—the window that needed to be cleaned. She focused with all her might on the TV.
“These men are not happy,” her father said. “They can’t say that because they will lose their jobs. Just look at them. They are holding it in. They always do that. They don’t say what they think, so they’re scared. No one is fooling me.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Probably? C’mon.”
She sat with her father and held his hand, which was heavy and dry.
Then her father said, “That one over there, the white man. I tell you what. He’s going to die. The rest of them don’t want to admit it, but he knows. Just look at him. He knows.”
Ida studied the one her father referred to. He had on a white suit, with white hair, but his face was bright red and sweaty. It was likely, given how old this show was, that this man was already dead. Perhaps his children, too, were dead by now. Anyone who loved or knew him. Or quite old by now, anyway, maybe in a room just like this one, sitting with someone somewhere. Hopefully sitting with someone.
It was getting late, and Ida probably knew better, but she had to try.
“I saw Mom yesterday,” she said.
“I’ve seen her before.”
“Well, I saw her yesterday. You know, when people matter to us we see them more than once. We make a regular habit of it.”
“I kicked the habit.”
“She’s doing well.”
“She always does well. That’s her specialty.”
“Well, but she hasn’t always. She’s been sick, she’s had some struggles.”
“You mean something didn’t go your mother’s way? Boy, I’d have loved to see that. What a spectacle. What a rarity. Woman fails to get her own way. World collapses.”
“I think illness is in a sort of different category.”
Her father didn’t respond for a long time.
“Illness is the only category,” he finally said.
It had gotten dark out. Her father didn’t like the overhead lights, so Ida had given him a little lamp, but she didn’t see it now. Whatever she brought in, a lamp, a radio, a vase of flowers, it was always gone when she returned. She used to leave some money in his drawer for outings, in case he wanted something, a piece of candy, a soda, but he would give it away or forget about it and then it too was gone. Only his clothes remained. His sweater, his robe, his pajamas. She had tried to replace the pajamas once but he had grown surly when he put on the new ones. He tore at himself and yelled, accusing her of trying to strangle him. He insisted that she get rid of them.
She tried to speak to the nurses. She knew they were overworked, exhausted, poorly paid, and that they had families of their own. She understood that. But when she asked them if there was something to be done, even if she paid extra, so that what she brought her father, even just the chocolates she knew he liked, might not vanish so quickly from his room, what they told her was that if she, Ida, were around more, if she visited more often, that sort of stuff was less likely to happen. You’re never here, they said to her. We never see you. Who knows what goes on in there?